


then they kill you (and then they love you again)

by Livid_Writer



Category: Escape the Night (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Gen, Heavy Angst, nothing is happy I'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:15:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25618699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livid_Writer/pseuds/Livid_Writer
Summary: sequel to i only miss you when i'm breathingro wakes up in purgatory but she still knows one thing : she loves her best friend and they're ever so brave
Relationships: The Detective | Matthew Patrick & The Jet Setter | Rosanna Pansino
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	then they kill you (and then they love you again)

**Author's Note:**

> took me over a year but I finally got around to finishing this, I'm not sure I'm completely happy with this but it's good enough to post and tick off my list. it's very vague and maybe poetic? idk it's something and I hope you enjoy it

He’s the first thing that she thinks about as the glass shatters around her. She hears a distant voice fade with sentiments of love and bravery into cold and silence. She hears him say I love you and be brave somewhere far away, somewhere that she’s not anymore. She can still sort of see his orange jacket in the corner of her eye, shaking as he tries to call his last goodbyes without breaking apart. He’s not there anymore. The first thing that she sees when waking up from the freezing warmth is not him like it should be, like it was for him.

There is no mention of him as she steps off her podium. There is no he got out, he is fine, he misses you so much but there is no I’m sorry for your loss, we tried our best but he just didn’t quite make it. Then again no one else gets any of that either - there’s no catch up for anyone, no just in case you missed its and certainly no you didn’t deserve what I did to yous because that’s just how it is, Joey’s just not like that. Joey knew. Joey must have known. Joey knew for all of them, all of the broken souls strewn around the room in all of the stages of grief at once, Joey must have known that there was no chance for any of them.

It’s a difficult process, she is certain of it, to somehow grieve for yourself. She is torn between grieving for herself and the life she could have had, would have had, and thinking about him. She thinks of him standing across from her in her kitchen illuminated only by fridge light telling her softly that he loves her for the very first time and then she remembers the feeling of having an almost brother by her side for the rest of her life. Her life that has ended now.

The promises of new life fill her with some kind of courage that she may see him again. She doesn’t ask after him because she fears that the response will be an empty apology from cold eyes that know how to do this too well. She’ll tell him that she loves him again, she thinks determinedly, she’ll tell him how brave she was and how the fire inside of her just couldn’t be quelled and then they’d stand in the same kitchen in the same house that she probably (almost definitely) doesn’t even own anymore with the same fridge lighting the room up and he’d tell her that he always knew she’d come back and that he loves her and he never stopped. Then they’d watch Harry Potter - or they wouldn’t because the thought of magic and witches makes her sick to her stomach although that could just be where the stab wounds lie somehow both open and closed and both painful and peaceful. They’d watch something nice, she tells herself comfortingly, something nice where the good hearted triumph and nobody dies and no one ever utters a word about magic.

Seeing her friends again does offer some comfort but also some questions - she knows others died, she saw others die and whilst Colleen is staring her right in the face JC is missing, Roi is missing, she can still hear the sounds of Teala screaming as she doomed her to her fate and Teala’s missing and she can still she can still see Safiya’s confused and frantic eyes as she died and Safiya’s missing and she knows that others were reported missing at the same time that some of the people staring at her were reported as missing as well. She doesn’t know why this group was chosen to be shown off to whoever somehow managed to visit a museum located in purgatory and why everyone else wasn’t.

She decides to get to the bottom of this mystery. He’s not here but his detective spirit is, the badge he entrusted her with isn’t on her person but she knows that in a metaphorical sense it is. He trusted her to bring justice to the group when he wasn’t there and she knows that she’s too curious to resist solving a mystery. Justine refuses to talk about her death in short, sharp and shallow breaths but Timothy, who she’s never met before but seems nice enough, softly whispers to her that Justine was buried alive and she shudders at the thought. Tim tells her that he shot himself in the head during a twisted game of Russian roulette. She is horrified but Tim tells her that he would rather have shot himself in the head than see Eva die (Tim then quietly mumbles that he hopes that Eva made it out because she was rather nice but she won’t tell on him) before resuming his funny yet tough guy mobster persona. She thinks that Tim might be the nicest person here because of that. DeStorm informs her with a perfectly straight face that betrays only the slightest hints of pain and loss that he lost his third challenge and was shot with an arrow and quite loudly proclaims that it was Alex’s fault, a comment at which Alex has the audacity to grin. Tana divulges a familiar story: she was not voted into a challenge but a knight came and slashed her stomach open but she doesn’t seem to know why. No one explains but from the looks on Gabbie and Alex’s faces she doesn’t need to ask to carefully slot Tana into the same category as Justine and Colleen - betrayed. Gabbie holds her hand over the spot where her heart used to be as she (in a suitably dramatic fashion) describes begging Alex to give her just a few more minutes on the challenge and then Alex slowly confesses the hopelessness he felt as he was dragged to the floor by a demon and stabbed and how he didn’t fight back as it hadn’t helped anyone else. Colleen has already loudly announced how the Maiden of Madness had stabbed and crushed and ruined love and trust. It’s her turn now but she doesn’t know how to explain. She knows that she falls into DeStorm, Alex and Gabbie’s category of just couldn’t quite make it and she knows that her story is not one of the dramatic ones. There was no vote just a drink that she couldn’t drink fast enough because it made her feel so sick and she knows that she lost fairly. She could tell them about how she’d known she had already lost and how unlike everybody else gathered there she had time to say her goodbyes. But she also couldn’t tell them about that. That memory is hers and hers alone and she knows that Joey won’t remember it the same way she does and she knows that no one here will understand how it felt to lose her brother for the second time that night and how it felt to hear him say I love you one last time and how she couldn’t run to him and tell him that it would all be okay as he cried and how he told her to be brave even though she knew that she wasn’t the one that needed to be brave anymore. So she tells them that she was stabbed and nothing more. She doesn’t tell them how it felt to bleed out on the table hearing him sobbing and seeing him shaking and knowing that there was nothing that she could do to help him anymore and she certainly doesn’t tell them how it felt to leave him behind and not know what happened. He loves me, she reminds herself, and he knew that I would need to be brave.

She manages to tell Justine that she went to her funeral. She thinks that Justine should know how it went; how her family had cried and her friends hadn’t quite believed it, how she had checked Justine’s youtube channel daily for months in case there had been some kind of mistake and one day Justine would just post and everything would be alright again. She wondered if someone had done that for her, if maybe he still watched her old videos and smiled and the memories and maybe sometimes just checked her most recent videos just in case he hadn’t seen a new one. She wondered how she would explain her absence to her subscribers and most importantly her family - maybe she’d dropped everything and gone to Tibet to be a Buddhist monk who was also secretly a woman or maybe she’d joined the CIA on a very special covert mission that specifically needed a baking YouTuber to be successful or maybe the pressure of running a youtube channel had gotten too much and she’d just disappeared in the grand tradition of Michelle Phan or maybe she’d eloped with the love of her life and lived a suburban dream for eleven point six months before it had all crumbled down into nothing. She doesn’t know how she’d even begin living her life again. But she knew that he loved her as much as she loved him and she knew that he would do anything to help her live again so she will let the fire inside her burn strong and she will be brave.

She isn’t surprised when the voting starts again. It’s Joey and this is how he works. She knows how this goes and she’s sort of glad that it’s them and not ten other randomly selected youtubers who had absolutely no idea what they were getting into. There is only the potential for one funeral now, one family precariously teetering on the edge of being shattered apart by the sudden loss of a loved one.

She is surprised when Justine is voted in. If he had been like her brother then Justine was almost a second sister to her and when Justine doesn’t come back but a crying Tana does she knows what has happened. Tana tearfully tells them about how Justine fought back, how brave she was and how Justine was strangled. She tries not to think about how it must have felt for Justine to gasp for breaths that weren’t there and to know that her air was limited for a second time. She realises that she never got to fully say goodbye even when she had the chance. Maybe that’s just how it is, she thinks, maybe you just love as much as you can for as long as you can and that’s supposed to be all you need.

She thinks of him in the spaces between fighting for a chance to see the sun again and in the spaces between the crippling knowledge that there’s no guarantee that anyone will make it out of this alive. She thinks of him sitting alone in her kitchen on the night before her house is sold because he knew that she couldn’t come back. She thinks of him murmuring I love you to the fridge light as if it was a direct connection to her. She tries not to think of him crying alone because there was no one to talk to about what happened to him and to her because no one would ever believe him. She tries to think of his past smiles, the texts that she would get when he’d just had an idea for a theory and the hour long phone conversations about nothing in particular. She tries to think of the way he laughed every single time they were compared to Dipper and Mabel Pine and the way he told her that he loved her like he meant all that he was saying and more.

Tim is the next to go. He has the confidence of someone who thinks they’re going to win but she remembers that Tim said that he was alright with it being him rather than Eva and she knows he’s not coming back. Tim’s that kind of person that wants everyone to be happy and Tim’s so much of that kind of person that she knows he could never give his all in a challenge that would kill someone. She thinks Tim might be happier this way. In muttered conversation he had told her about a challenge he had won against a man named Matt, how Matt had given up because he’d killed someone - Tim had said unintentionally - and how even though Matt had held the potion, which turned out to be poison, up to his lips with such bravado and confidence and had even apologised to Tim in case he was right but Tim had sort of known that Matt had known that he hadn’t got it right, had sort of known that Matt killing himself for Tim was him doing what he felt he should have done for the other girl and how Tim had tried to dissuade him from drinking but Matt had anyway. She thought that Tim had picked up on that, had picked up on the fact that the girl’s death had weighed so hard on Matt’s conscience that Matt had wanted to die so much that he had given up. She thought that wishing that Eva would win might have been Tim not wanting the same death as Matt had had. Tim had wanted to die happy and she thought, as strange and naive as it seemed, that he might have succeeded.

She thinks of him when she is wooing the Chinese emperor because she had always wanted him at her wedding. She thinks of him telling her to be brave when she’s about to walk down the aisle and her laughing at him because she doesn’t need to be brave to marry the love of her life and he would smile, maybe say something about his own wedding and tell her that she would be brave because it was so brave to stand up and make a promise in front of all the people she loved and make a vow of eternity or something suitably musical theatre speech or song like so that she could call him a nerd. She does need him to tell her to be brave when she walks down the aisle to this weird emperor guy she’s never properly met though. She needs him to stand by her side and tell her that he loves her and that she’s going to be so brave.

She sees DeStorm’s sacrifice for Alex. She hadn’t expected it but she understands. She understands the grief and pain that he couldn’t quite conceal was because he knew that Alex had deserved that win for his original death because of past actions that had never been properly explained to her and she understood the decision to sacrifice himself. She knew that he wanted to go home and she wonders when he realised that he couldn’t live with himself enough to actually go home. She doesn’t tell the group when she and Alex return to them because it’s not her story to tell and she’s pretty sure that DeStorm’s actions and words were for Alex only and he’d appreciate keeping up his tough bad guy facade. She thinks of him, the person she’d die for, and tries to think the words I love you across the distance to wherever he is.

She meets Merlin and the only thing she can think about is the beaming smile that would take permanent residence on his face if he were here to meet the actual Merlin and how much he would stutter and chatter about nothing really just so he could talk to Merlin about the myths and King Arthur and magic and now she really needs to sit down before she cries. She thinks that she should get Merlin to write something for him so that she can see his face when he sees a message from Merlin to him and have him swing her around in a hug that lifts her off her feet as he says I love you and you’re the best friend ever.

Tana and Gabbie die together. She remembers them saying that they once survived together and so she thinks that they wouldn’t mind dying together if they had to die. Tana is slashed by a sword again and whilst Gabbie struggles a little Tana just lies there still as if she’s trying to savour her last painful breaths and she realises why they were chosen. They’re the people that gave up, the people who, even if it was for a few seconds before their death, gave up on life. Justine gave up as she was buried and stopped screaming; Tim gave up immediately and even hoped he would be theone to die; DeStorm accepted that the third time was not his charm and owned up to his mistakes; Tana didn’t know why she was killed and gave in to her death by not even attempting to stop the bleeding; Gabbie begged for more time but knew that Alex would beat her; Alex didn’t bother to struggle; Colleen had given up on her friends as she was voted in and knew there was no escaping her death and she had known that she was going to die as soon as she had taken the first sip of her drink and had said her goodbyes. They had been given a sort of second chance to find a new love for life. Maybe. Or maybe she was reading too far into a cosmic coincidence.

He’s there. He’s actually there. He’s standing right in front of her, breathing, smiling. She runs to him - she doesn’t know what else to do - and hugs him tighter than she’s ever hugged anyone before. He lifts her off of her feet and continues to hug her. She whispers I love you into his chest, quietly, like it’s a secret and a promise. He doesn’t say anything back.

At first she thinks that she maybe didn’t hear him respond or maybe he didn’t even hear her in the first place. She thinks that maybe he had meant to say I love you but had been too choked up on his emotions to say anything. She thinks about how this must present such confusing emotions for her - a night he’d like to forget but a friend he’d like to remember.

She says it again but this time she says it more forcefully, louder, with conviction. He doesn’t say anything back. He begins a conversation with someone who isn’t her about things that aren’t I love you, I’ve missed you and oh god I’m so glad I get to see you again but his arm is still wrapped around her so maybe she can take this physical declaration of love and run with it. He’s talking about his new job, with the society against evil, and she desperately tries to not think about a hushed conversation had in the corner about how the name doth protest too much and how it was such a shoddy cover for such an obviously evil organisation. He doesn’t seem happy, she notices, just determined. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe this determination can see them through.

He goes with her to the statues and she thinks about how much she’s missed him, even if to her it’s been merely hours she knows it’s been months for him and maybe she’s catching up on lost emotions or maybe she’s just desperately trying to connect with him. She gets to watch him solve apuzzle and talk about gorgons and smile and part of her wants to gush about how, merely and hour ago, she met Merlin and how she thought of him the whole time but she knows that they need to get through this so that they can spend hours on end talking about marrying a Chinese emperor and meeting the actual Merlin without the threat of being sent to hell if time runs out. He smiles at her whilst they’re solving the puzzle and she’s thankful that this time she knows to savour it, savour the warmth in her chest as she watches someone she loves involve her in doing something he loves. She runs over to him after they’ve solved the puzzle, she tells him that she loves him all over again and she tells him that he’s been so brave but he doesn’t respond again. She’s not sure why.

He’s sent into the maze with Colleen and she worries that he’s going to die. He’s going to die again and this time he might not come back smiling. Concern doesn’t cross his face, instead he just smiles confidently and assures Colleen that they’re going to be fine. He doesn’t assure her of anything, in fact he’s not even looking her way. In those days, earlier days, which seem to be slipping away from her now, he would assure her that he was going to be fine even if he was only going away for a day, in fact he’d assure her that he was going to be fine just on the drive back to his house but now, when he’s facing death for - she realises she doesn’t know the amount of times he’s faced death and it occurs to her that this might be a very important thing for a best friend or chosen sister to know and then, in a realisation that destroys her far more painful way than the knives did, she realises that she doesn’t even know him any more. She doesn’t know the name of his first child and she doesn’t know if he’s still doing YouTube or what content he’s making and she doesn’t know how that night has changed him for better or for worse (or more accurately definitely for the worse but in what way) and she realises that for him it’s been so long since they’ve talked. He’s grieved her, she thinks, he’s lived in a world that she’s not in and he’s survived it. The man walking into the maze stoically facing death with Colleen is not the same man she remembers in her fridge light tinted mind, he’s instead the man who probably attended her funeral and tried to pretend to her family that he didn’t know exactly what had happened to her, he’s the man who returned to his everyday life knowing that he’d said that he loved her for the last time and heard her voice saying it back for what he had known, almost definitively, was the last time, he’s the man who had joined the society against evil and was apparently a competent and trusted enough member to be sent here on a rescue mission and he’s the man who had seen the sunrise at the end of that night and had been forced to rationalise her death and get on with his life. Of course he doesn’t want to say I love you back, she thinks, who wants to remake friends with the ghost knowing that there’s a very strong chance that she won’t be there when he goes back to his life, a life that the ghost has no part in anymore, who wants to repair their heart only to break it into pieces again for the dead girl who might never see the dawn. Still, she can’t help but call out to the man that she once knew in the only way she knows how to, to tell him that she loves him and to tell him to be brave. He knows to be brave, she can see it written all over him and maybe it’s all he knows how to be now but he does need to know that she loves him; still, even through the barrier between life and death. He hears her and she knows he does because a flicker of something that she doesn’t recognise, and oh how she hates that she doesn’t recognise it, moves through his eyes and it must have been something important because he says it back. He says I love you. He says be brave. He says it with a sort of smile on his face that is half fond and half desperately sad. He says it back to her. He moves to go into the maze and although she’s watching a man that she doesn’t fully know face his death she’s also watching part of a man that she knows incredibly well go to.

He doesn’t return from the maze. Nikita says disappeared but she doesn’t know if that means disappeared and dead or returned to the living world. Colleen is dead though and at least this time, although it’s not really much of a consolation, she doesn’t feel like she’s murdered Colleen; at least this time she had a shot. It turns out that she didn’t really, Alex tells her that Nikita had kicked over Colleen’s tower at the last minute, and she’s sad that this isn’t really a surprise to her. She hopes that he’s alive, that Nikita wouldn’t kill a fellow survivor, that maybe they’d become friends over the time she’d been gone and that he must be alive because otherwise Nikita would look a bit more guilty but knowing as much about Nikita as she does she doesn’t know if that logic works. She hopes it does though. Almost. She wonders if they’d become friends like she was friends with him, if they laughed in the kitchen and then went and watched Harry Potter together, laughing the whole time and she wonders if she’s terrible for sort of hoping that they hadn’t, that the friendship she shared with him couldn’t be replaced in any way. She wonders if in a way she’s hoping that he hasn’t moved on.

The meet Scheherazade and she tries not to think about how much he would have geeked out about this meeting, not when him talking excitedly about the gorgons is so fresh and recent and she doesn’t know if she’s ever going to see him again even if she gets out. She’s grateful when no one dies and she’s even more grateful when they get to bring Colleen back, even if she has to desperately focus on the now because if she doesn’t she’ll think about how they brought him back last time and how breathlessly happy she’d felt when she’d seen him again after thinking he was gone forever. She thinks about how she’ll feel the same when she gets to be alive with him again after this but this time she’ll try to be more happy and with more breath since she’s not breathing at the moment and she never thought she’d be missing something as crucial as breathing so dearly. She hopes that Colleen won’t think he failed her in that challenge and that she doesn’t rail against him like she’d railed at all of them when she’d first woken up, rightfully so but it still hurt, because she doesn’t think that she could take that. She’s fragile now. Of course she’s fragile, she thinks, she’s teetering on the edge of life, hell and purgatory and that would make anyone fragile.

They lose Alex next. She watches as he’s shot in the chest and falls back into the water and she remembers them telling her about DeStorm’s death. It’s a cruel irony, DeStorm died so that Alex could live and Alex, after watching himself become the version of DeStorm that he had hated, had been killed in the same way. She watches him accept his death with no contest again and she wonders if he had ever thought that he would actually get out, he hadn’t the first time and she thinks that he wouldn’t have changed his mind. The world would have moved on so much since he’d left, he’d have had a funeral and he wouldn’t have a world to return to and she thinks that Alex, ever the pragmatist, would have realised this. She’s started to realise it for herself as well, the only difference is that she has him, or maybe she has him, waiting for her.

It’s a wonder to see dinosaurs, she remembers watching Jurassic Park with him and listening to him go on about how velociraptors would have had feathers and when they’re chasing her it doesn’t help that she knows that they should look different because they still want her blood. The caveman seems nice but she can’t get him reminding her that cavemen and dinosaurs wouldn’t have existed at the same time out of her head; this is purgatory, she reminds his voice in her brain, many eras can and do coexist. She watches Bretman and Colleen and Joey all get closer and closer and more cohesive as a team but she doesn’t think anything of it.

Joey insists that because she hasn’t been in a challenge she should go into this one. She remembers this logic and she despises it. There’s a fire inside of her, or at least there used to be, and she doesn’t need to face death for that to come out. She tries to remind him that there’s a perfectly good reason that she’s never done a challenge: she’s always been useful and kind and she’s always had everyone’s backs, there’s no reason to test her because she’s proven herself outside of challenges. She suspects that Colleen’s still holding something against her, she deserves it she thinks, but she’s fairly certain that Bretman won’t vote for her which gives her some hope. Of course it’s her name that gets pulled out, Joey always gets what he wants and he seems to hunger for blood. He doesn’t seem to have the decency to look apologetic as she’s forced into a death game, it’s the same blank expression that he always has because this sick game has become far too normal for him and something in her regrets being so kind to someone who cares so little about her.

She’s going to win, she tells herself, she doesn’t have him there to tell her to be brave but she knows that she will be because she has to be. For him and for her. She’s resourceful and quick witted and as long as she doesn’t have to drink something horrifying she’ll be grand. She’ll be standing in the light of her fridge and he’ll be telling her how much he loves her and how brave they both were in no time. She’ll have her life back. She’ll see her family and tell them that it’s all okay and this was just some terrible mistake and she’s back for good now. She’ll bake and post on her YouTube and everything will be normal again. She’ll be her again.

Then, when she’s standing in a cold and muddy pool with water up to her waist but determination up to the sky, she realises that the person she’s against is Bretman. She can hear him breathing. Bretman who’s still alive, Bretman who has a family who don’t know he’s gone and Bretman who still definitely owns his house and hasn’t been declared missing. No one’s mourned him yet because they haven’t had to, no one’s been to his funeral yet because he’s not dead and no one’s listening to his old YouTube videos on repeat just to hear his voice again because they can just call him up and listen to him talk whenever they feel like it. Bretman has everything that she doesn’t. And then she realises that she can’t possibly win. She can’t win because she’s already dead, she can’t win because her family know she’s gone and she can’t win because she doesn’t own her house anymore and she’s been declared missing. People have mourned her because they’ve had to, people have been to her funeral because she’s no longer alive and with them and people are having to listen to her old YouTube videos just to hear her voice again because her number’s been disconnected because she’s dead and gone. He’s already mourned her, she’s seen the evidence, and she has no reason to doubt that her family have done the same. She’s not destroying anyone by losing but she’s destroying so many people by winning.

It’s weird, she thinks, to have to mourn yourself. To consciously let yourself go and know that there’s eternal damnation waiting for you, to await the pain of the mauling velociraptors that really should have feathers. She gets a moment to herself. There’s no one to apologise to except herself. She could have gone far, she thinks, if she hadn’t craved adventure so much, if she hadn’t thought time travelling with her best friend in all the world to save a town caught in the seventies, if she hadn’t loved Harry Potter so much, if she didn’t have a moral compass. But it’s okay. He’s out there, he’s living and he does still love her. He told her. He told her merely hours ago and she knows he meant it because telling her that he loves her means that he did slowly mend his heart only to tear it back open for a ghost of a girl who won’t be returning to him. That was his true moment of bravery: allowing himself to love someone who would never come back, looking at the heart that he had mended himself and then looking at a dead girl searching for comfort and looking back down at his heart and choosing to tear it to pieces with his bear hands for her sake, knowing that he’d have to sit back down and mend it slowly again without her. Her moment of bravery is also love - maybe that’s the only way to be brave, to love someone with everything you have - she loves people she’s never met so much that she’s willing to die for them, well not actually die for them because she’s already dead but give up her chance at life for them which is close enough. She is brave, she thinks, there is still a fire in her and it won’t ever go out. She knows that because she’s given that fire to everyone she knows, to Colleen and Joey and Bretman who are all here and to everyone she’s not with right now. She’s going to live, she thinks, because what is living if not being known and knowing, there’s a fire inside of everyone now and they know that it’s her and that’s living. Or maybe it isn’t, but it sounds nice and who would begrudge a dead girl some pleasantries. She’s still not breathing. She hasn’t been for a few hours. She’s grateful for these hours, for purgatory, because she has mourned herself. She’s come to terms with the concept of moving on.

She’s not ready. No one’s ever ready. The velociraptors are hungry and their teeth sting and she can hear screaming, but not his this time. She can hear him somewhere in the distance, across time and space and life and death, and she hopes he can hear her too.

“I love you, be brave.”


End file.
